Chardin, the great genre-painter of the eighteenth century, who depicted the middle-class interiors of French life, is as homely as the Dutch school with the added refinement of his race. Le Bas and Surugue and a crowd of other engravers popularised his work. He was as a painter what G. J. Pinwell was as a draughtsman, his picturesque interiors of ordinary life have a charm not easily equalled.
Moreau the younger held the mirror to fashionable society. Engravers scattered prints from his pictures broadcast, and probably contributed something to sowing the seeds for the coming Revolution. His record of fashionable licence leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. La Sortie de l'opéra, Le Souper fin, and the rest have all the loathsomeness of Hogarth's depiction of vice except that they are varnished over with an elegance which is vitiating.
Among the most masterly engravers of the eighteenth century in his fine interpretative work of the Dutch school of a century earlier, is Johann Georg Wille (1715-1808), a German, who practised mainly in France. In the days of the Revolution he lost his fortune and became blind, after producing masterpieces for fifty years and training a school of engravers. Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, Augsburg, Paris, Rouen, were proud to elect him as member of their academies. He was engraver to the Emperor of Germany and to the Kings of France and of Denmark. His name and fame are not of common report in England. The average man prefers Landseer and Cruickshank, if he is not a collector whose
